Steam lots. Steam, cards, marketplace and bots that cut hamsters. Using the Steam Market

The SteamBroker.com service provides a platform for trade in things from the digital distribution service Steam. On our site you can buy from other users or sell themselves any items from your inventory, which can be transferred via Steam trade offer. For example, things from games like Dota™ 2, Counter Strike: Global Offensive™ (CS:GO), Team Fortress™ 2 (TF 2), Unturned and others. Sales are also possible steam trading cards and even games, as gifts in inventory, which can also be transmitted. You can buy things for the price they indicate other users, which guarantees great prices without extra charges.
You can also use our site as shop for your items. You'll get personal link which will display only your items.

Our service guarantees absolute safety all transactions. The seller receives money only after you accept the purchased items. Our system controls the accuracy receiving items by the buyer and payment of money to the seller.

The Marketplace is one of the most popular and core features of Steam. You can make good money by selling in-game items, especially if you understand the value of items and have some market trading skills. Unfortunately, the Steam market is not initially available to all users. It is not enough to simply register an account to gain access to it; for this you will need to fulfill a number of conditions.

Using the Steam Market

All players who do not have limits on their account can easily access this section through "Community" > "Marketplace".

In this case, it opens without additional difficulties and is available for selling and purchasing goods.

However, new and limited accounts do not have access to these features. The reason is always indicated in the market section itself. In the screenshot below you can see two errors at once that do not allow you to use this subsection of Steam: no purchases have been made on the account for a long time and it has certain restrictions. Chances are you've also encountered some of these conditions. Let's look at them, as well as other possible problems, in more detail.

Any blocking and restrictions are related to security: this is how Steam tries to prevent the possible theft of items, which often follows after accounts are hacked.

Limited account

Most often, restrictions are set due to the fact that the account has been registered, but not verified: to do this, you must make a purchase of $5 or simply put this money in your Steam wallet without spending it until you want. You can top up your wallet in parts - they will be added up until the total is $5. Until you do this, the account will have the status "Limited", which will significantly complicate its use. In particular, in addition to the blocked site, you will not be able to send friend requests and use many other functions. In the article at the link below, we explained how to purchase the game on Steam. You need to use exclusively Method 1, since the payment must be made through the internal system of the service.

When using another currency, the amount of purchases or deposits into the Steam wallet must be equivalent to the current dollar exchange rate. You can find it through a search engine or in the online bank/electronic payment system you use.

A beginner may notice that in the right corner there is an inscription "You don't have a Steam Wallet", however, you don’t need to create it - it will appear on its own after the first deposit of money to your wallet.

Purchase made less than 7 days and more than 1 year ago

Another problem is the infrequent use of Steam. To confirm your intention to use the market, at least once a year you must make a purchase on Steam, be it a game or the Marketplace (who previously had it unlocked) for any amount. Moreover, in our case, you will additionally need to wait 7 days after making the purchase, naturally without returning the game or demanding money back. If you do this, the restriction will resume.

Disabled Steam Guard

Steam Guard is necessary to protect your account. When it is disabled, you will not be able to use the Marketplace until you enable one of its two types. If you are not satisfied with using a mobile authenticator, use linking your account to your email. To enable it, go to "Settings". This can be done immediately through the top panel or RMB on the Steam icon in the tray.

On the tab "Account" click the button "Manage Steam Guard Settings...".

From the proposed options, choose the first or second depending on your needs. Linking Steam Guard to your email requires you to log in to your account again, don't forget this.

Important! After enabling, you will need to wait 15 days - after which the Marketplace will be unlocked and become available. Removing and re-enabling will reset the day counter. After deleting the mobile authenticator and switching to confirmation by mail, the market will be blocked for 15 days.

It became clear that someone would make good money from it. And of course I don’t mean Valve :) Everything is clear with them. The note essentially consists of several directly or indirectly related episodes.
Episode #1. One of my good friends from Steam asked a question - how does a new game, with a price on Steam of 1000 rubles, cost 500 for some of my friends? At that time, I could not find an adequate answer. After all, even if resellers bought the game at some discount, for new games they are not so great and the price will never be so low. But resellers also need to earn money...
Episode #2. Steam Marketplace and Cards. Once again I am convinced that Valve employs brilliant marketers (I think that’s what it’s called). I think you know what I mean. In my opinion, with the advent of gaming cards, they reached a new level. Let's see what's happening right now. As you know, New Year's cards will be available on Steam until January 3rd. I won’t explain now what it is and why it is needed. If you are reading this, most likely you are already aware of the matter. Try opening a trading platform and selecting, for example, lot Snow Globe #1. Observe the dynamics while refreshing the page. Have you noticed price fluctuations of 1-2 rubles? Are you smart? :)
Episode #3. "Cursed be the one who bought this lot!" :) When purchasing the same cards, you will most likely encounter the fact that the lot will already be purchased by someone. Unless, of course, you buy a more expensive position. Or maybe you don’t care - after all, an overpayment of 1-2 rubles means nothing to you. The first thought that arises in this case is that it would be nice to automate the entire purchasing process. Attention! Valve doesn't welcome any automation of trading operations and your Steam account may simply be blocked. History already knows cases of “frayers” who were ruined by “greed.” The warning has been given, which means it’s time to consider possible solutions to the problem. If we are talking about banal purchase automation, then we don’t have to create anything complicated here. For example, using the plugin for Firefox and Chrome iMacros, in half an hour it is quite possible to create scripts (I used JavaScript and, of course, the built-in language of the plugin) that completely automate the process of purchasing a lot at a given price (or lower). For more advanced things you will probably have to write a full-fledged "bot". The complexity of development will certainly increase. But the resulting possibilities can be called limitless. However, the bot developer should first of all think about placing his creation as “close” to the trading platform servers as possible. This is obvious - a long delay in such cases only increases the likelihood that the tasty item will be bought by someone else.
Episode #4. Having received something that speeds up interaction with the trading platform, the most “entrepreneurial” ones have the idea that by playing on this very difference of 1-2 rubles from Episode #2, they can get benefits. Yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about - the most common (for probably not very advanced people, though...) speculation. Let's try to return to Episode #2 and observe a little... Literally after five minutes of review, I managed to find several working “bots”, in all likelihood belonging to the same person. Meet:
AntonBur, IcqBur, OlyaBur, KolyaBur. Their author didn’t even bother to disguise himself :) Pay attention to the profiles and list of friends - I suspect that most of the people on this list are also bots. In the five minutes that I watched the lot, according to my rough estimates, only one of them was able to earn from 30 to 80 rubles from the resale of cards. Not bad, right?
Episode #5. Who needs Steam virtual currency? After all, Valve does not allow you to cash out the money received or withdraw it to other payment systems. And here it is appropriate to remember Episode #1. Buying a game for 1000 and selling it for 500 through, say,

We study popular ways to make money on cards and farming items on Steam.

To bookmarks

Everyone who uses Steam has at least once heard about “cards” and the sale of in-game items. When the next sale starts, you can often hear that someone is buying a game “just to farm cards,” or bragging about how they made money by selling some item from the game. We decided to figure out how this system works, and at the same time conduct an experiment to find out whether it is possible to make money on the Valve trading platform.

How cards work

First, a few words about how to receive cards for those who are not registered on Steam or have never been interested in the process. Thematic cards appear in your Steam inventory after you spend a couple of hours in the game. Their number varies from 5 to 10, but the player will receive only half of this number. To get the rest, you will have to trade with other players, or go to the Steam Market and buy there.

The user sets the price for the card based on the last price posted on the trading platform. For example, another user’s price is 5 rubles, yours is 4 rubles 95 kopecks. The proceeds go to the internal Steam wallet, but it is impossible to withdraw money from it.

Page with collected cards

After collecting all the cards, the player presses a special button, after which a beautiful icon is “forged” from the cards. Icons have a level: the more icons we create, the higher it is. There is also another way to get cards: instead of selling game items, you can turn them into gems, and from them you can already make a set of cards.

Creating badges increases the player's personal level in the Steam profile, which in turn affects the frequency of card packs and additional slots for new friends. At level 40, packs with cards dropped out to me once every two weeks, sometimes more often. What game will the pack be for? This is hard to predict as it all depends on the popularity of the game and the number of badges created by the community. Most often, card sets dropped from little-known indie games, visual novels, and games that had recently appeared on Steam, from which I had already pinned an icon.

No one is safe from identical cards after unpacking the set

After forging the badge, the player will receive an additional background for their profile, a discount coupon (usually only for niche indie games), and an emoticon for chat. Backgrounds and emoticons can also be sold, and they are divided into three categories: common, uncommon and rare. Items marked "rare" often cost a couple of hundred rubles, which in some cases will pay for the full cost of the game. It all depends on how popular the game is, because in popular games prices for items are quickly reduced to a minimum.

This is how the icons change as you level up. The last icon is “metal”

In addition to standard cards, there are “metal” cards (very rare). Most of them cost up to 400 rubles apiece, and the price depends on the popularity of the game. A special “metal” badge is created from these cards.

These 12 metal badges are valued at several thousand dollars

Why is all this needed? To some extent - because it's exciting. Comparable to the feeling from childhood when you were bought a Kinder Surprise and you don’t know what toy will be inside. Here, instead of toys, rare emoticons and backgrounds drop out that can be used or simply sold.

CityScape is my favorite background from the game Terra Incognita ~ Chapter One: The Descendant. The developers took it from the game Streets of Rage. The approximate price at the time of writing is 12 rubles

How does selling items and cards work on Steam?

Selling a card on the Steam marketplace is almost no different from selling an item from a game. It's all about the nuances. To begin, the user goes to his inventory, selects the desired item and looks at the very bottom line, which says, for example, this: “From 2.65 rubles. Sold: 4 in the last 24 hours." 2 rubles 65 kopecks - the price of a sale request based on the last lot. At this price, the item can be bought from you on a first-come, first-served basis, but if you lower the price, for example, by 40 kopecks, the item will be bought faster.

There may not be a line with a price. Items from newly forged badges cannot be sold instantly, so instead of a sell button, it will be written about when (on what date) sale and exchange will be possible. Also, if you want to sell an item instantly, you should pay attention to the separate “Purchase Requests” column on the trading platform. In it, users set their own price at which they would like to buy this or that item.

After selling an item, the money goes to the user's Steam wallet. The funds can be used as a small discount when purchasing a game or used to buy other cards. If you don’t want to spend money, then it’s easy to change items. Any game on Steam has its own forum and “Exchange” section, where users leave their requests for exchanging items. For example, if you really want an inexpensive rifle from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but there are no other items for exchange from CS: GO, then the user can offer 10 rare cards or several inexpensive items from Dota 2 for this rifle.

Attempts to make money

In four years, my level on Steam has risen to 97, but I wouldn’t say that I get any significant income from the cards. Some players spend thousands of rubles to “boost” their accounts: it’s reminiscent of the old version of the social network VKontakte, when people spent crazy amounts of money to increase their reputation level under their avatar.

Of all the icons, I hung the most informative one - the number of years since registration on Steam

On average, I spend from 100 to 150 rubles on cards every four months. I deposited money from a credit card, forged 5-6 badges and later sold items from them for 200 rubles. With this money I bought other cards, made a badge again, and so on - a constant circulation of money for a couple of months.

Expensive metal cards in the game “Petka and Vasily Ivanovich 2: Judgment Day”

Sometimes you can make a profit and use the proceeds to buy a good game at a discount. But these are isolated cases. Often you get back the same amount you invested, or 50% of it. Some chained badge items are so expensive that it is almost impossible to sell them at the recommended price. The price of an emoticon from some indie game has to be reduced by half, otherwise no one will buy it. Well, or wait a few months until you find someone who doesn’t mind spending a couple of hundred rubles on a picture with a resolution of 80 by 80 pixels.

Badges and cards have become an integral part of Steam for me. Sometimes I even get the feeling that I don’t consider completing a game complete if I haven’t pinned down an icon in it.

For the sake of experimentation, I tried several methods with which you can make money. Passionate people also know other little-known methods: someone creates additional accounts for profit, but I only used a personal profile and 50 rubles in my wallet.

The traditional and correct way to get cards is to play yourself. Some, however, try to bypass this need and use third-party ones that imitate the game and farm cards without user interaction.

This is how ArchiSteamFarm works

Method number 1: just sell

For example, a player bought The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, spent a lot of time with it, and after some time discovered cards in his inventory. He didn’t understand why he needed to spend money on some badges, so he sold all the cards that fell out on the trading platform. There are still plenty of players on Steam who have a huge collection of games but a low profile. They don't want to spend money on cards and sell everything they get. And the proceeds help you save on future purchases.

Method number 2: making money on indie games

Go to the “Games under 150 rubles” section and sort them by price. Indie games are cheap, and bad indie games cost pennies. Every week they are given big discounts, often the price drops to 15 rubles. At the time of writing, the cheapest game on Steam was Grind Zones.

4 rubles 90 kopecks is not money. In two hours you can get all the cards and sell them for 12 rubles. That is, if you have five accounts on Steam, then you can get about 60 rubles from selling cards from Grind Zones. This way of earning money is real, but inconvenient: a lot of time would have to be spent just transferring cards from account to account. Theoretically, in a couple of months of active card farming you can earn money for an AAA game.

Method number 3: return the game

One of the most popular, but also dangerous ways to make money on cards. For example, I learned about it after purchasing the remaster of Worms: World Party at a summer sale. The game refused to launch due to incorrect operation on monitors with resolutions higher than Full HD. You can solve this problem by lowering the resolution in Windows settings. Such manipulations did not suit me: I bought the product, it does not work, now I want to return the money for it. The money was returned a week later.

The most interesting thing is that during unsuccessful attempts to revive the game, two cards fell out, and after returning the game no one took them away.

Farmers indicate “frequently crashes” in the reasons for return

Some Steam users specifically buy games with expensive cards (15-20 rubles and more), knock them out using the ASF program and submit a request for a refund. Steam, as a rule, always returns money if the user played for less than two hours, and 14 days have not passed since the date of purchase. It is better not to abuse this method, because sometimes accounts are temporarily blocked due to frequent refunds. There are no fools at Valve, so I didn’t take any further risks.

Method number 4: buy cheaper, sell more expensive

More myth than reality. During sales for many games, the price of cards drops as they try to sell them cheaper. There is an opinion that if you buy cards during a sale, then after it ends they can easily be sold at a higher price. I tried this with several games, but only managed to earn 8 rubles. Indie Game Bundles. The main problem is that with free games you can hardly get more than 100 rubles a month, even taking into account several accounts.

Farming Items

Some players make good money by reselling game items. The method is doubly effective if you work with rare items from popular games: for example, buy a knife for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for 3,200 rubles, and then sell it on another site for 3,250 or 3,330.

It is important to clarify the situation with third-party sites here. You cannot withdraw money from Steam; you can only spend it on buying something in the store itself. This is how Valve tries to maintain control over the site and prices. So users have to resort to the services of third-party sites, but no one there is safe from scammers. It often happened that players were deceived and they lost money. Valve is mostly neutral towards third-party services, intervening only in cases of outright fraud.